Illustration of the twin jets observed in a pair of young stars – ALMA TELESCOPE
MADRID, June 13. (EUROPA PRESS) –
Observations with the ALMA radio telescope and the Webb space telescope have discovered parallel twin disks and jets arising from young stars in a multi-star system.
This discovery was unexpected and unprecedented, given the age, size and chemical composition of the stars, disks and jets. Its location in a known and well-studied part of the Universe increases the excitement, according to a statement of the ALMA radio telescope.
The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) observe very different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. Their joint use allowed the scientific team to discover these twins, hidden in radio and infrared wavelengths in the WL20 star system, located in the nearby rho Ophiuchi molecular cloud complex, more than 400 light years away from us.
“What we discovered was absolutely crazy,” shares astronomer Mary Barsony. “We had known about the WL20 star system for a long time. But what caught our attention is that one of the stars in the system seemed much younger than the rest. With MIRI and ALMA together, we saw that this star was actually two stars one side by side. A disk surrounded each of these stars, and each disk emitted jets parallel to the other.”
ALMA detected the disks, while MIRI found the jets. Co-author Valentin JM Le Gouellec of NASA-ARC recovered and reduced archival data from ALMA to reveal the composition of the disks. At the same time, Lukasz Tychoniec of Leiden Observatory provided high-resolution images showing the enormous size of the disks, equivalent to about 100 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun. Another co-author, Martijn L. van Gelder, provided resources to process the data collected by MIRI, which revealed the chemical composition of the jets.
Barsony adds: “So if it weren’t for MIRI, we wouldn’t even know these jets exist, which is amazing.” ALMA’s high-resolution observations of the disks surrounding the two newly observed stars revealed the structure of the disks, as Barsony explains: “Someone looking at this ALMA data without knowing that there are twin jets would think, oh, that’s a big rim.” on the disc with a central hole, instead of two edges on the discs and two jets. “That’s pretty remarkable.”
Another notable thing about this discovery is that it may never have had the chance to happen. JPL scientist Michael Ressler explains: “Much of the research on binary protostars focuses on a few nearby star-forming regions. I had been granted some observing time with JWST and decided to break it up into a few small projects. For a project, I decided to study binaries in the Perseus star-forming region. However, I had been studying WL20, which is located in the rho Ophiuchus region, almost on the opposite side of the sky, for almost 30 years, and I thought, ‘why Why not sneak it in? I’ll never have another chance, even if it doesn’t fit with the others. We had a very lucky accident with what we found, the results are surprising“.
By combining multi-wavelength data from ALMA and JWST, these new findings shed light on the complex processes involved in the formation of multiple star systems. The group plans to use ALMA’s future enhanced capabilities, such as the Broadband Sensitivity Upgrade, to continue unraveling the mysteries surrounding the birth of stars and planetary systems.
